West by Carys Davies

Post contains spoilers and discussion of sexual abuse (as per the narrative)

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A fascinating “What If..?” that begins as “What if a man in the mid 19th century convinced himself that dinosaurs still existed and abandoned his family to go looking for them in the the then unsettled American West?” and slowly morphs into a “What If a British person wrote a Western?”

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Yes, having spent time in and around non-English/British people, I am slightly more aware of the stereotypes they hold of us than many of my English/British peers. I think English/British people like to believe that our international reputation is that we love tea, are polite yet bumbling, and always carry umbrellas. Some of these hold true, yes, in some regards, but the more pernicious reputations tend to hold more weight: that we’re all fucking ugly and that we’re all obsessed with paedophiles.

As someone who’s now been performing amateur comedy around other amateur comedians for a year, I’m more than aware that these things certainly do hold up in London pub basements. It’s not necessarily the ugliest people telling the most jokes about abuse, but there’s certainly a correlation between the most English/British people – or the people most conspicuously trying to pander to an English/British crowd – who use these themes/topics as a subject of their “jokes”¹.

Anyway….

So, yes, Wild begins (and continues) as a gentle sorta cross between Marilynne Robinson and Cormac McCarthy…

It is soft domestic scenes of a struggling family with a mule farm, cut between the struggles of a man and his indigenous guide as they trek through rivers and mountains over a couple of years, fruitlessly searching for the dinosaurs the white man foolishly believes exist somewhere in the continent…

The man read about excavation of massive fossils while grief-addled following the death of his wife, and convinced himself that, distant and away across the land known as America, these giant beasts must still pound the ground…

He gets his sister to move into the mule farm to look after his daughter and heads off into the west, packing cash and trinkets to trade as he goes.

He never comes home and he never finds dinosaurs, though he never really ever seems to be in any immediate peril or danger – there are no hostile indigenous peoples, there are no white settler charlatans who try to rob and trick him, and there are no wild animals that appear who want to eat him. It is weather – the changing seasons – and food scarcity that are the real antagonists to him and the guide he picks up, known as Old Woman From A Distance.

About halfway through the novel, the cuts back to the sister and the daughter begin to take a more sinister turn, as two men in the community begin – separately – making plans to assault the daughter.

In these occasional cut aways from the exploration adventure, the narrator is a close third person as one of the men, in particular, builds up his plans and seeks an opportunity to attack.

What then happens – and this is where West truly gets weird – is that we travel forward to Old Woman From A Distance arriving back at the trading post where the Frenchman who speaks his language introduced him the dinosaur-hunting man earlier, with all of the man’s possessions and his horse.

This narrative then flashes back to the end of the man’s life (sickness and a slow death) and Old Woman From A Distance’s solo trek back eastwards, then his continued trip even further eastwards, after he is sent on by the Frenchman to return the caché of letters the man had written to his daughter, while alternating with short chapters detailing the attempted sexual assault of the daughter by a farm hand, with the novel then falling into a bizarre “race against time” format whereby a journey that would have taken most of a year is cut between actions that cover a handful of minutes, with Old Woman From A Distance arriving in the man’s town, realising it was the place his family was displaced from when he was a child, then killing dead both of the town’s paedophiles (the other is the librarian), including the main one (the main one, yes) in the midst of an attempted rape.

Somehow, though, Carys Davies manages to make this work, these completely disparate timelines running alongside each other towards a clearly signposted (narratively, if not necessarily realistically) shared denouement, without either losing tension, or allowing the completely different pacing to distract from the alternating passages.

The novel, then, though evocative and descriptive on a page by page basis, in its structure seems to be making a very distinct commentary (or gesture towards) the fundamental dishonesty of narrative fiction.

As readers, we are so used to accepting coincidence and simultaneousness that, frankly, would be unbelievable if considered without a suspension of disbelief most of the time.

An hour feels different in different contexts, a few minutes can bear the same weight as many months in a life…

By disassociating page length and physical in-book location from time, Carys Davies decries the blunt meaninglessness of the simple scaffolding we pretend is essential to suspension of disbelief.

Coincidental rescue (stranger arrives just in time to save a life) is a narrative trope, a cliché, but introducing it with this level of clarity defangs any response that may consider it cliched here…

Davies isn’t trying to pretend the story is not a story – she isn’t trying to pretend that there is an unrealistic neatness…

A reader is never unaware of the fact they’re reading a structured, composed, fiction. And that does, actually, let it get away with its convoluted narrative coincidences!

By owning up to them, by making them so clear, there’s no shame. There’s no pretence. There’s just a story. A very British retelling of an American myth of exploration and adventure, one where the biggest danger of all is the paedophiles in your backyard.

West is short, it’s engaging, and it’s the only time I’ve ever seen a book bury a celebrity blurb beneath quotes from reviewers barely more prominent than I am. Yes, friends, this is indeed a novel described as “Wonderful” by Sarah Jessica Parker!

It’s interesting, it’s intriguing. It’s also short. Which is often a plus…

Not bad!

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1. Aaaaand all of the awful rat-faced radicalised incels with their vapes and notebooks (they all carry notebooks – is 4chan (or whatever they use now) very pro paper and pen?), of course, make loads of jokes about that topic, but I try to block out those guys and not reflect on the fact that I’m participating in a hobby that is, in waaaaay too many spaces, absolutely fine with hate speech. And the “r” word, which they all use all the time and evidences a lifetime spent too online. I never quite understand why they’re out at a comedy night rather than, like, out on dates. I certainly never felt comfortable being as self absorbed as comedy performance implies/requires until I had the explicit permission of a romantic partner to be out of the house and doing that! Why do these people have such self-confidence? Why don’t I have more??? ↩︎